


Four Things You Can't Tell Just By Looking At Her

by vatrixsta



Category: Firefly
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-02
Updated: 2009-12-02
Packaged: 2017-10-04 02:22:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vatrixsta/pseuds/vatrixsta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ship is quiet at night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Things You Can't Tell Just By Looking At Her

\--

The ship is quiet at night, when the crew is asleep, and she is glad for it, because it affords her the opportunity to consider the man snoring softly at her side.

Mal is a force of nature, the eye of the hurricane, so still and calm, while the world around him turns chaotic. He is both the fiercest man she's ever known, and the gentlest, and it is a contradiction that has given her a great deal of pause over the years.

Inara knows men. She has always known men; was trained to know them. They are not complex. They don't say one thing, but mean another. They like sex, can be controlled with it, and don't care if they're lying with their wife or a common whore, so long as she gives them what they want.

When she speaks of Mal to people, she does so flippantly; she says he is unlike any man she's ever known, that he's reckless, criminal, and completely without proper social skills. There isn't a thing she's ever told another soul about Mal that isn't true, but the big picture leaves out the details, and everything Mal is, is in the details.

And he is so unlike any man she's ever known.

He spent years trying not to touch her, and she must have been blind not to see a man working so hard to keep himself from something he wanted so much. Mal's like that -- he works so hard to keep himself from being exactly what he is. He tries not to care about people, not to be noble, not to have a family in this world, and he's failed at every unreasonable goal he's laid before himself.

He does not want to love her.

Inara's known that almost from the moment she met him. He felt something for her, she felt something for him, and though he meant certain complications she'd rather avoid, it had been Mal who'd always kept them apart, who'd made it clear exactly how much he would not let himself love her. And Inara would never love a man who couldn't love her back.

His hand reaches out for her in his sleep, and she rests her head on the pillow again, smiling as his palm finds purchase on her hip. Her eyes close, and she lets him lull her back to sleep, his thumb stroking an unconscious rhythm against her skin. Before she slips away, she prays, the way she used to as a child, the way she hasn't in years. Inara prays Mal doesn't act like his usual self and pick the worst possible time to start achieving his goals.

~

An emptiness stirs inside her, something far worse than what the war left her with. She'd never really had much to call her own, beyond being a soldier. There had been Mal, of course, but the two were wrapped up in one another, and of all the things he'd given her over the years, the one thing Mal had never made her feel like, was a woman.

Wash did that. He filled her up, with love, with hope, with laughter, and most folks didn't get them, didn't see that she could survive anything on her own, but he was everything she'd needed to live, and now he was gone, and she was left, surviving with the emptiness. Empty heart, empty womb, and only the faint imagining of guileless green eyes she would never meet to keep her warm at night.

So Zoe spends a lot of time not sleeping now, not wanting dreams more than she's ever not wanted them before. She spends time with River, because she likes to know what people die for, what Wash died for. Zoe doesn't blame River, hopes River knows that, and not because she can read her mind, but because Zoe hopes she's never taken it out on the girl, the way she takes it out on Mal, because she knows exactly how much he lets her get away with.

And she misses Wash. She misses having a Mister. She misses his silly voices and sillier theories and the way he looked at her like she filled his whole world up. She misses the children they'll never have and the old man looking back at her on their porch eighty years from now, the one who had spent his whole life loving her, who she had a history with, who she made a home with.

And she hopes. She hopes and dreads a day'll come she doesn't miss him so much anymore, and Wuh de ma, how much that day will hurt.

~

Serenity is her first love, and the place she thinks of as her real home. There had been her first home, of course, the one she lived in with her parents and snuck boys into in the middle of the night, but she'd always felt strange there, foreign, and longed for little more than something exciting.

For all the thought she's put into picturing her future, she's never pictured someone like Simon in it. He's proper and stiff and looks completely out of place with engine grease all smeared across the bridge of his nose, and yet, he makes her toes curl, and her spine tingle, and the floor beneath her feet lurch the way she's taken care to make sure Serenity never does.

There's nothing she's loved in her whole life more than she loves Serenity; before she met Simon, she wondered if she'd ever love anyone the way she loves that ship. As she looks at him in the engine room, or tending to River, or clean, but for that smudge of grease on his cheek because he came down to give her a midday kiss, she thinks it's a good thing she'll probably never have to choose between Simon and Serenity, because she wasn't too keen on breaking the heart of her first love.

~

Sometimes, she can't decide if she's still crazy, or saner than any of them. She is also growing weary of deciphering which emotions belong to her, and which are the property of the other souls aboard Serenity.

Her heart beats faster when Mal walks into the room, and it takes her a fraction of a second to realize it is Inara's heart that speeds up as his arm brushes against hers over dinner. Tears threaten while she's flying the ship, and the ache in her gut for Wash is so overpowering, so raw and visceral, that it takes even longer to recognize Zoe's agony as something separate from the sadness River feels at the loss of a sweet friend.

Kaylee loves Serenity with great passion, and this, oddly, is the one emotion River can so easily separate from her own love -- as it is the only emotion River shares with another, that her own heart eclipses. Serenity is more than a ship, Kaylee knows that well enough; Serenity's a home, and a harbor, and River loves her the way Mal taught her to, but she loves her beyond that, as well. Serenity is freedom, and salvation, and sanity, a safe haven in the chaos where there are only seven other voices inside her head, seven beloved, welcome voices, whose pitch and timber keep River from teetering over the edge into complete oblivion.

River has taken to keeping a diary, something Shepard Book suggested a long time back, something she hadn't been able to do, before. Keeping a diary meant remembering something you had to do every day, and to River, time had been a fluid thing, one moment flowing into the next, then doubling back to last week, or last year, everything that had ever been, or ever would be, existing all at once.

Things are... quieter, now. Slower. She has more time to observe, and deliberate over her place in things. So River asks herself questions, usually late at night while the ship is sleeping and there's no one to disturb her. Sometimes she comes down to the cargo hold, as she has tonight, and finds Jayne already asleep, having nodded off in the middle of one of his hobbies. He doesn't trust anything anymore after all that's happened, has changed more than any of them, and River finds this constant state of vigilance to be sweet, if futile, and leaves him to his delusions of heroism. They are, after all, such beautiful delusions.

What River has come to know for sure is that she is a weapon, one that she finally has some hope of controlling. There's a girl in there, too, somewhere, a girl who used to love to dance and dream of meeting the perfect man, someone like her father, or Simon, who could match her intellectually, curry her favor with charm and wit, and possess the kind of dark good looks only found in stories. There is no one for her like that on board Serenity, and she's glad for it, glad for men like Jayne and Mal who are not proper, who only care why she says the things that she does, not how.

Jayne twitches in his sleep, reaches out to swat an imaginary mosquito, then settles again. She looks up from her writing and listens to his dreams, and smiles when she sees herself, baking him a pie as he and Mal clean their guns and Kaylee gives him a foot massage and Zoe walks around in her underwear. Serenity gives a creak in her sleep and River giggles quietly and wonders if she could manage some apples, sugar, and flour on the next world they stop on.

\--end--


End file.
